Spike TV's pre-show to the Xbox E3 press conference on June
6 will be the first program ever streamed live on the Xbox360, says Jon
Slusser, SVP digital media at Spike Digital Entertainment.
The network televised the Xbox press conference at the
Electronic Entertainment Expo last year and saw good ratings, according to
Slusser. "It was a brainstorm out of how do we make it bigger," he says of the
decision to stream Spike's exclusive coverage on Xbox Live this year.
The Xbox live-stream is part of Spike and GameTrailers.com's
multi-platform initiative to covering E3, the annual video game conference in
Los Angeles where video game companies make announcements and demo new
games. The multi-screen approach -- GTTV
Presents E3 All Access Live -- is part of a larger initiative across all
MTV Networks to target viewers on the platforms they already use. "This is by
far the biggest investment we've ever made in E3," Slusser says.
Spike will broadcast five hours of television coverage on
June 6 from12-5 p.m. ET for its exclusive coverage of the Xbox and EA press
conferences (which will be presented commercial-free) and an additional two and
a half hours of analysis from Spike's stage at L.A. Live. An additional 15
hours of content will be streamed over two days on GT.com, Spike.com, Twitter,
Facebook, iPhone and iPad, and Spike's Times Square billboard.
As part of the multi-platform coverage, viewers will be
able to pose questions in real time that GTTV hosts will ask guests in the
studio. "We're taking advantage of the live format in that from all these
different platforms," Slusser says. "We're really making the audience part of the
experience."
